Low and lean, was Don Siegel’s mantra. It’s an art that’s lost
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And you never had the feeling there was something missing in his films. Everything necessary was told in under two hours.
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He was a very economical director. If it could be done in one or two takes, on to the next. No nonsense and very effective. That is why, for example, the first Dirty Harry film remains the best.
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I think SUDDEN IMPACT is also be a contender for best Dirty Harry movie.
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All I know is I now have the main theme for Magnum Force stuck in my head and ITS GOING TO BE A LONG NIGHT
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Eastwood learning from Siegel and throwing a kind of grand Guignol operatic horror to the mix, agree it’s a contrnder
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Best Siegel film…Charlie Varrick has to be up there.
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Interesting analysis, boiling down to the question: how long can Apple finance 200 million dollar movies which bomb at the theatres?
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For any interested.
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A lot of heavy lifting leading nowhere.
It’s funny I was watching an interview with Terry Hayes a few days ago about his new novel where he said he had written a book associated with a new movie but he couldn’t talk about it and I was going to post that here but completely forgot…
Anyway his new novel “Year of the Locust” hits tomorrow and I can’t wait to dig into all 800 pages of it!
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Vaughn actually brings this up (about 35 minutes in) - a speech originally intended for Sam Rockwell alone changed on the day so that it would flit between Rockwell and Cavill.
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“It is the greatest privilege of my professional career.”
Cavill really sells it.
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…his Superman role wasn’t exactly great…
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Well… Zack Snyder, you know.
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I really can’t agree with that. For me, the original Dirty Harry is a real classic full of legendary one liners and classic scenes. Sudden Impact there and against is a typical 80’s action film full of violence and average criminals, who seem to have walked straight out of a slum. Only one scene is cool, the one in the coffee shop and contains the legendary Clint one liner. Even Lalo Schifrin cannot reach the level of the 60’s and 70’s (Mission Impossible, Bullit, Enter the Dragon, Magnum Force) by now coming up with a synthesizer score.
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Understood. I am more of an Eastwood partisan than a Siegel fan (whom Eastwood learned from, but improved upon). I love Fernando Croce’s mini-reviews, and his take on SUDDEN IMPACT is quite good:
To Dirty Harry as High Plains Drifter to A Fistful of Dollars, a lacerating analysis of the vigilante mythos that made Clint Eastwood a star. In the moribund legal system Inspector Callahan has evolved into the Reaper himself, a capo declares him “the one constant in an ever-changing universe” moments before keeling over from a heart attack. Revenge (“the oldest motivation known to mankind”) belongs to the blonde victim (Sondra Locke) of rape under the boardwalk—she copes by painting Munchian portraits and tracking down the assailants one by one, “a .38-caliber vasectomy” is her specialty. “How can such a howl of anguish come from such a sweet girl?” Advancing on Magnum Force and The Enforcer, Eastwood ruminates on his protagonist’s macho drive while gradually ceding the spotlight to the castrating muse. At the carnival the glowing, spiraling harbingers of doom are contrasted with the filmmaker’s signature chiaroscuro, at the clinic the heroine confesses her plan to her traumatized sister in a stark two-shot, her wrath at once chilled and heightened. (“Dark Visions Exhibit,” reads the plaque at the gallery where her works are displayed.) Meathead the gassy bulldog and the retirement-bus chase for comedy à la Beckett (More Pricks Than Kicks), alongside it is the profoundly ugly side of justice, “a matter of methods.” The murderess shoots down the razzing bulldyke-witch (Audrie J. Neenan) and then her own mirror reflection (Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid), her sister’s catatonic doppelgänger figures in the police’s official story. The elegant construction of Hitchcockian doubles builds toward a baroque update of Strangers on a Train involving the chief scum (Paul Drake) and a carousel’s phallic unicorn. After this, only the acid burlesque of The Rookie.
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I watched Dirty Harry last night for the first time I’m years, things cropped up such as the mention of his dead wife by his friend, the doctor. It’s framed as if the grief and loss has made him more entrenched in his views. 'just wait till the cavalry arrives" he knows he’s an agent of destruction and doesn’t want the burden. Is he a fascist or has his bereavement and dissolution caused fascist behaviours to come to the fore.
It’s an incredible portrayal from Eastwood, watching it again I appreciate his skill as an actor more.
Beautifully framed its relevant today as it was in 71
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“If I had tried to kill you your brains would be all over the field! Where’s the girl?!”
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